Shaping a new vision of community
ONE contradiction that inheres in feminism is that it constrains women to pursue their emancipation in apparent confrontation with the rest of humanity. And the challenge to the movement in the new millennium will no doubt be the finding of a formula that would integrate the broad schema for women's eventual equality with the litany of problems and woes that still plagues mankind. But what essentially is feminism, and why do so many women genuflect even fleetingly at its altar? Some may even consider it inadvisable to proffer a definition of a concept that is by no means static, but one that is animated by its own compulsions and by the varying demands of women. We believe that feminism can be defined as a system of analysis by which one views the world with its distinctions between male and female. It is a notion with which one seeks to redress the weight of discrimination against women in a world where social relations are determined by gender. Feminism is by its very nature political, since it challenges any system of thought or practice that allows women to occupy a socially inferior position. The post-modern wave of women's liberation which began in the early 1970s witnessed not only a surge of scholarship as women delved into the humanities to find and analyse the origins of their subjugation, but it also experienced a diffusion of feminist thought as women re-interpreted ideologies and adapted them to their own perceptions and realities. So there are feminists who are conservative, or liberal, or black and lesbian, or religious and spiritual. The early 1990s saw the emergence of bands of youthful feminists, who brook no prevarication from a male dominated system. These young women are not only educated and upwardly mobile, they are also moneyed and they refuse to practise the patience of their mothers as society evolves to accept them. They are making their own way to power through an aggressive `in-your-face' activism. Yet for all their assertiveness, these modern-day feminist warriors must admit that they owe whatever progress they are making to the plodding work established by their mothers, grandmothers and other female forebears over the past century. There is no doubt women have made advances that were only dreamt of by their grandmothers. Since Sally Ride's odyssey into space in the 1980s, several female astronauts have successfully completed assignments to this new frontier. And earlier this week, one leading western country made public its decision to allow military women to be trained for combat. Still there remains prejudice and inequities troubling women in the world of work. Some feminists respond to these inequities with a confrontational and even hostile advocacy. They seem to demand a remaking of the world in which the balance of power will be in favour of the female principle. We prefer to adopt the comment made by Betty Friedan, the author of the `The Feminine Mystique' and one of the founding mothers of post-modern women's liberation. Writing in an issue of NEWSWEEK magazine about the time of the UN's Fourth World Congress of Women, Friedan employs exquisite reasoning to set forth the configuration of prevailing western thought. She then recommends a new paradigm of social policy that would transcend all identity politics. Friedan argues that pursuing the separate interests of women isn't adequate, and is even diversionary. Instead, she says, there must be a new vision of community.
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